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Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

It’s not very often that I see an original score of music
that is about to be performed.

On Sunday, Sept. 23, 2012, the Trinity Presbyterian Church
in Arlington VA performed a choral anthem “Blessed Are Those”, based on Jeremiah
17:7-8 by John Shepherd. In the “synecdoche” atrium of the church (Philip
Seymour Hoffman would love this place), the score of the hymn, in E Minor but
with heavy use of accidentals and passing tones in the score, was in view,
before the 11:15 traditional service.

The composer seems to be Minneapolis-born (I think I recall
the name from my days with AGCMCC there), with a descriptive link (website url) here.

There was an (English) Elizabethean composer John Sheppard
(1515-1558), whose name is sometimes spelled as Shepherd, Wiki link here,
or list of workshere.

You can look at scores here (PDF) or play them (mid, Quicktime). Try it!

Judith Fulp-Eickstaedt gave a sermon “Willing to Yield”,
after a children’s sermon on the same topic.
Yes, there is more to life than “competition”. “Yielding” is often necessary for
self-interest. For example, it’s
important to yield and follow courtesy in traffic to avoid accidents. In sports, “yielding” is often in effect out
of a bigger interest in winning for the team.
A baseball player lays down a sacrifice bunt rather than swinging for
the outfield fences—or a baseball team shelves its top pitcher on the advice of
surgeons rather than risking rushing him into playoffs, because it is concerned
about its long-term interest.

Sometimes, it seems, though, “yielding” demands a surrender
of self-interest to that of others in the group beyond anyone’s possibility of
choice or control. Sometimes the
applicable word is “sacrifice.”

I think that sometimes, when one faces disruption from the acts of others, one can ask, what does this other person (people) really need?

Monday, September 17, 2012

Saturday afternoon, I stumbled into the H Street Fetival in
NE Washington DC, on the way to the close-out of DC Shorts at the Atlas
Performing Arts Center. I hadn't known about the festival until I arrived.

I encountered a number of pavilions where music was being
performed – specifically, hip-hop – I guess – not in my element. The repetitiousness of it (and lack of variety of development) kind of
leaves me behind. I didn’t even hear
anything like the lilt of Lady Gaga.

Visually, the festival was a spectacle, much of it taking
place along streetcar tracks intended for the “pink line”. The X2 bus line, although slowed down by
people getting on, is almost like a “light rail” line on its own.

Wikipedia has some interesting characterizations of hip-hop,
referring, for example, to its apathy toward "intellectualism", link here.

I've never heard of a "diaper bank" before. Perhaps some "collectivism" is inherent in some of the exhibits.

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

I got curious and checked out my CD of the two symphonies of
Karol Szymanowski (see Saturday’s post on “King Roger”).

I have a Marco Polo CD with the Polish State Philharmonic at
Katowice, conducted by Karol Stryja, conducting the Symphony #1 in F Minor, Op.
15, amd the Symphony #2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19. The recording, as were many from Records International
and Marco Polo (as had been many from Artia before) were made behind the Iron
Curtain before it was pulled open or, as Alfred Hitchcock would have said, “torn”. I think I found this at Tower Records in DC
during the store’s boom time.

The First, completed in 1907, comprises just two movements,
totaling twenty minutes and sounds very thick.
It sounds as though the composer had no particular inspiration for a
slow movement.

The Second, in 1910, is much more original. In three movements, it starts gently with a
rising theme even marked “grazioso”, but gradually becomes thicker and more
impassioned. The second movement, marked
Lento, it just typically postromantic, but the Finale, a fugue, will stay in
one’s head. The theme, related to the upwardly mobile figure from the first
movement, transforms into a dance-like element that reminds one of the A-minor
third movement “scherzo” from Mahler’s Ninth, but the fugal treatment, leading
to a tremendous climax at the end, has the exuberance of the double fugue that
concludes the Mahler Fifth. It’s as if
Szymanowski wanted to compose another “middle Mahler” symphony, but shorter and
more manageable in its details.

Saturday, September 01, 2012

The opera “King Roger”, by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski
(with libretto written with his cousin Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz) has attracted
media attention recently because of a reasonably tempered version staged at the
Sante Fe Opera by Stephen Wadsworth.

I bought a recent BluRay DVD (Unitel Classica) of a 2010
performance at the Bregrenz Festival with Sir Mark Elder conducing the Vienna
Symphony with the Polish Radio Choir and Children’s Chorus.

The story is loosely based on the history of a 12th
Century King of Sicily, Roger II, who engaged the Pope in a monumental battle
to recognize his reign. But the opera, obviously
metaphorical, has some of the elements of existential horror. A mysterious “shepherd” or prophet (Will
Harmtmann) appears and captivates the King (Scott Hendricks) and his wife
Roxanna (Olga Pasichnyk). Others in the kingdom (especially the Church) want
him killed or driven out, but he seduces the entire community, leading to a
wild dance and then a sacrifice scene.

The music is post-romantic (from the 1920s), a mixture of
Strauss, Scriabin, and the pre-atonal Schoenberg, with a little Debussy (the
language of the “Martyrdom of St. Senasitan) thrown in. The shepherd’s
followers stage a dance that might invite comparison with the Golden Calf dance
in Schoenberg;’s “Moses and Aaron”, and at the end, Roger sings homage to the
rising Sun (after the carnage, which is
truly horrific for a stage presentation), which, also now as a soloist without
the chorus, invites orchestration reminding one of the end of Schoenberg’s “Gurre-Lieder”,
leading to one massive C-Major chord.

The Shepherd’s body is covered in gold paint (like the “Ferrie”
character in Oliver Stone’s “JFK”), but the other actors get smudged over
pretty much in the sacrifice scenes (which include oxen heads made to look like
monsters). Merely acting in this opera
(that is singing as a virtuoso) demands bodily abuse. There is plenty of eroticism and dirty
dancing, perhaps more of it heterosexual (involving Roxanna) but it’s clear
that Roger is attracted to the Shepherd, and that he has been having a side
relationship with the Arabian sage Edrisi (John Graham=Hall), actually based on
a Muslim figure who really was a diplomat in Roger’s court.

The Sante Fe opera has a discussion by Charles McKay on
YouTube.

An interesting aside on the composer. He had written a homoerotic novel “Efebo”
that was largely lost in the Nazi invasion of Poland.

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